Amy Carpenter (W&M '18) Shares Her Experience Running a Tutoring Business

What is your graduation year, and did you have a double major?

I graduated in 2018 with a double major in Classical Studies – Latin Concentration and English Literature. In 2020, I graduated from William & Mary’s School of Education with my M.Ed.

 

Can you tell us a little bit about your experience at William & Mary?  What drew you to Classical Studies?  

I absolutely loved my time at William & Mary. I loved that William & Mary was a place that valued academic rigor but didn’t pit students against each other. When I visited campus, I didn’t sense competition between peers; I saw a collaborative spirit where students supported each other and celebrated each other’s victories. I knew I wanted to be a part of that.

While in undergrad, I was part of the Game Design Club, where I wrote music for our student-made game. My first club meeting on day one of freshman year is also where I met my husband! Starting my sophomore year, I became involved with the TutorZone, our on-campus tutoring service, and ramped up my involvement junior and senior year to the point that I was not only tutoring but helping run the whole program.

As a grad student, I was the Graduate Assistant for what was then Academic Enrichment, and today is called Academic Wellbeing. That time was a blur: in two years, I added my puppy, Clementine, to our family; got married; bought a house; started my business; and earned my M.Ed.

Latin has been a love of mine ever since I was first introduced to it at the beginning of 7^th grade. I loved that the language wasn’t constrained by word order, and our Latin teacher did a fantastic job of showing us early on how that meant Latin authors and poets could paint with their words in ways that English just doesn’t allow. I never stopped studying Latin from that point forward.

 

What are you doing now and what is your favorite thing about your job?

When I was still in my graduate program, I got to try long-term subbing for five levels of Latin at Hampton Roads Academy in the fall of my second year, and it solidified how much I enjoy getting to form closer relationships with students in one-on-one support. Based partly on that experience, I decided to turn my long-standing passion for tutoring into my career.

I officially opened my business, Carpenter Tutoring, LLC, in January of 2020. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with students from preschool to Ph.D. candidates and everywhere in between, but my real loves are assisting with college prep and transition, executive function coaching, high school math, and, of course, Latin.

For a brief time after I graduated, I continued to work part time at William & Mary in what was then the Dean of Students Office and taught part time at a local homeschool co-op. Since February of 2021, Carpenter Tutoring has been my full-time focus.

Other than being my own boss, my favorite part of my work is that I get to form really close-knit relationships with my students and their families. Some students have stayed with me for five years, so I’ve gotten to watch them grow and blossom into young adults. I like that I interact with a wide enough age and subject range that I’m always on my toes. And getting to slow down in the summers is a real plus!

 

How has your experience studying the ancient world helped you in your career?  

Practically, my experience in Classical Studies prepared me to offer a niche service to families seeking support for their students taking Latin at the middle school, high school, and college levels.

More generally, Latin was one of the subjects I was most jazzed about as a student. Over the years, I had fantastic teachers and professors, all of whom taught me invaluable lessons about sparking curiosity, balancing formal instruction with nerding out over a cool poem or grammar trick, and making something so often cast off as a “dead language” not only relevant to but critical within our modern world.

 

More broadly, how has that experience shaped you as a person?

Studying Latin, Ancient Greek, historiography, women in antiquity, magic in the ancient world, and more is just deeply, deeply cool to me. But those areas of study also impacted me greatly. Reading the ancient stories that became archetypes for modern classics helped me understand the depth of the history of what I was reading in my English classes and helps me enrich my support to students of English and history today. Learning first-hand about the experiences of people separated from me by thousands of years but connected through their vulnerability and transparency helped me recognize humanity in others by seeing glimpses of myself in their experience. Engrossing myself in a different way of viewing the world forced me to question and expand my own preconceived notions and thoughts.

I also think Classical Studies people are just cool. There’s a little common thread that runs through all of us, I think, that connects us no matter if we’re meeting for the first time or the thousandth. Most of my educational and personal heroes are connected to Classical Studies in one way or another, and I don’t think that’s by accident. So, rock on, fellow Classics nerds!

 

 What advice would you give a student who is interested in your field?   

I thought for a long time that I wanted to be a teacher. For an equally long time, I thought and was often told that being a teacher would be pretty much the only direct application of my Classics degree. But here I am, the better part of a decade into operating my own tutoring business, thanks in no small part to my time tutoring Latin and Ancient Greek at the TutorZone and long-term subbing in Latin. If you asked me when I graduated undergrad where I’d be in five years, I never wouldn’t have even conceived of having my own business, let alone having that be my full-time focus. Doors will open that you didn’t even know were there, and life has a way of weaving a path you can’t always foresee but which often leads you to where you’re meant to be—albeit sometimes by a circuitous route.

If you’re considering entrepreneurship of any kind, my recommendation is to build within stability. Even after I knew I was going to start my own business, I gave myself two years to build a stable enough business to rely on for full time income. For the two years, tutoring was always the focus, but it was never the only. If you can swing a way to do this, it allows you to test your concept before relying on it completely, which also gives you the wiggle room to take risks and try things you may not have the stomach for otherwise.

If you’re considering education, my advice is to always remember what it felt like to be the age of the students you work with. Kids just want to be seen. Meet them where they are. Introduce things on their level, not yours. Integrate their interests, academic and otherwise, into your approach. Be the kind of educator you wish you had or the kind of educator your favorite teacher was.

And above all, protect your flame. Educators have a way of giving all they have to others, but we have to give that grace to ourselves as well in order to keep serving those we teach to the best of our ability. Plus, it’s a lot more fun that way!